The questions about the Phillips Curve only highlight a bigger problem in economics. To the extent the profession addresses how to manage an economy, the consensus in the USA and Europe seems to be to restrict intervention to monetary policy. Japan and China have adopted much more fiscally interventionist policies and have had impressive results.

Economics is inherently about money and wealth, though the profession itself discretely avoids discussions of those subjects whenever possible. That task is reserved for anthropologists of wealth and power and for sociologists, whose insights, often penetrating, can and are successfully ignored by professional economists for the most part. This has the effect of leaving the profession insular and isolated from all but the very wealthy to whose prejudices leading economists pay strict attention.

It is unfortunate that there are so few prominent people who can, as Queen Elizabeth did in 2009, ask the profession how they could have gotten things so wrong. Surely there must be a better solution than having more inquiring monarchs.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."